9 Mar
2013
9 Mar
'13
4:53 p.m.
Hi,
an external hard drive does spin down too often for my taste. It's a
http://www.wdc.com/global/products/specs/?driveID=762&language=1 and I
wonder if there's a way to disable it.
"All WD external hard drives will spin down (enter into power saver
mode) after 10 minutes of drive inactivity. Once the drive is accessed
again, the drive will exit from the power saver mode and spin back up.
Please Note: This is a permanent feature of most of our external hard
drives and cannot be disabled. WD externals that include the WD
SmartWare software can use the software to change and/or disable this
feature." - http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1376/
Regarding to a German PDF SmartWare doesn't support this particular
external hard drive and even if it would, it seems to need Windows or OS
X.
I guess it's impossible to disable it or to increase the time, but
perhaps it's better if I anyway ask the community.
Is there a way to adjust this feature? I fear that spinning up and down
again and again, will reduce the lifetime of the drive significantly and
assumed I'll use it for recording, it might cause performance issues.
Is it possible to use such drives for recording, without any risk? If I
would test it, I might not cover all worst case scenarios, think it
wouldn't cause issues and then be surprised if it fails in an
unfavorable moment.
This drive should be used as a backup media only, but I'm thinking to
buy an additional external hard drive for recording, to be able to visit
a Windows user (Mac became seldom here :), but to boot Linux from the
drive and to record on the drive.
Regards,
Ralf
9 Mar
9 Mar
5:39 p.m.
Quoting Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf(a)alice-dsl.net>et>:
"All WD external hard drives will spin down
(enter into power saver
mode) after 10 minutes of drive inactivity. Once the drive is accessed
again, the drive will exit from the power saver mode and spin back up.
If it's designed to spin down it's probably also designed to be able
to handle that.
An obvious workaround would be having a cron job doing a 'touch
TempFile' or something similar on the disk once every 5 minutes or so.
- Peder
6:06 p.m.
On Sat, March 9, 2013 8:39 am, Peder Hedlund wrote:
Quoting Ralf Mardorf
<ralf.mardorf(a)alice-dsl.net>et>:
Would that actually touch the disk or just the copy of the temp file in
the ram buffers? You are right though that the disk may have it's own
buffer to give time for the disk to spin. It depends if the manufacture
felt the spin up time was an issue. It used to be that a windows system
would stop doing anything else while printing and nobody thought anything
of it. (I haven't had to use windows for some time so I don't know if this
is still the case) Also they may expect the system's lazy writing to make
up for it.
--
Len Ovens
www.OvenWerks.net
"All WD external hard drives will spin down
(enter into power saver
mode) after 10 minutes of drive inactivity. Once the drive is accessed
again, the drive will exit from the power saver mode and spin back up.
If it's designed to spin down it's probably also designed to be able
to handle that.
An obvious workaround would be having a cron job doing a 'touch
TempFile' or something similar on the disk once every 5 minutes or so.
6:38 p.m.
Quoting Len Ovens <len(a)ovenwerks.net>et>:
ClamAV 0.97.5
On Sat, March 9, 2013 8:39 am, Peder Hedlund wrote:
Quoting Ralf Mardorf
<ralf.mardorf(a)alice-dsl.net>et>:
Would that actually touch the disk or just the copy of the temp file in
the ram buffers? You are right though that the disk may have it's own
buffer to give time for the disk to spin. It depends if the manufacture
felt the spin up time was an issue. It used to be that a windows system
would stop doing anything else while printing and nobody thought anything
of it. (I haven't had to use windows for some time so I don't know if this
is still the case) Also they may expect the system's lazy writing to make
up for it.
--
Len Ovens
www.OvenWerks.net
"All WD external hard drives will spin down
(enter into power saver
mode) after 10 minutes of drive inactivity. Once the drive is accessed
again, the drive will exit from the power saver mode and spin back up.
If it's designed to spin down it's probably also designed to be able
to handle that.
An obvious workaround would be having a cron job doing a 'touch
TempFile' or something similar on the disk once every 5 minutes or so.
6:49 p.m.
Quoting Len Ovens <len(a)ovenwerks.net>et>:
The previous reply was due to a trigger happy Send finger, sorry about that...
Initially it would only hit the cache but I think it's be written to
disk within the remaining five minutes.
You could issue a 'sync' but I'm not sure a forced sync during, say, a
recording would be the proper thing to do, since it syncs all cached
data on all disks.
Another option would be to do a 'dd if=/dev/zero of=TestFile bs=1k
count=1 conv=fdatasync' to make sure the data gets written to disk
immediately (http://romanrm.ru/en/dd-benchmark).
- Peder
An obvious
workaround would be having a cron job doing a 'touch
TempFile' or something similar on the disk once every 5 minutes or so.
Would that actually touch the disk or just the copy of the temp file in
the ram buffers?
6:10 p.m.
On Sat, 2013-03-09 at 17:39 +0100, Peder Hedlund wrote:
Quoting Ralf Mardorf
<ralf.mardorf(a)alice-dsl.net>et>:
Thank you Peder, that's a good idea, if the spin downs should cause
issues.
Regards,
Ralf
"All WD external hard drives will spin down
(enter into power saver
mode) after 10 minutes of drive inactivity. Once the drive is accessed
again, the drive will exit from the power saver mode and spin back up.
If it's designed to spin down it's probably also designed to be able
to handle that.
An obvious workaround would be having a cron job doing a 'touch
TempFile' or something similar on the disk once every 5 minutes or so. 
6:44 p.m.
On 03/09/2013 05:39 PM, Peder Hedlund wrote:
Quoting Ralf Mardorf
<ralf.mardorf(a)alice-dsl.net>et>:
Don't count on it. Joern recently told me about his experience with
similar "Green" WD drives where the drive died for him after a few month
of continued use. He mentioned something about a special windows driver
that controls the spin up/down cycles for WD drives, but I did not
bother to inquire the details.
"All WD external hard drives will spin down
(enter into power saver
mode) after 10 minutes of drive inactivity. Once the drive is accessed
again, the drive will exit from the power saver mode and spin back up.
If it's designed to spin down it's probably also designed to be able to
handle that.
7:18 p.m.
On Sat, 2013-03-09 at 18:44 +0100, Robin Gareus wrote:
On 03/09/2013 05:39 PM, Peder Hedlund wrote:
Hi Robin,
I like that you set "Green" in quotes.
When I searched for external drives the WD seems to be the most pleasant
drives. I didn't ask the community, but read some reports ;).
It's exactly what I fear, if I'll use the drive very often, it will die
exactly in 2 years and 1 day, when there's no warranty anymore. If it
would die during period of warranty, it would be much more worse. My
dealer would send me a new drive, that's not the issue, but to copy > 1
TiB of data from a click-click drive each half year isn't fun, even if
most data should be available by the internal drives.
IMO it's bad hardware design. Would anybody use a 3.5" drive that needs
an external power supply, as portable accessory for a battery powered
computer? We even wouldn't save the planet, since the less power
consumption does pollute our world less, than replacing every few month
the drive by a new drive.
Until now all my internal drives died after around 2 years, the Samsung
I'm using now are already 4 and 5 years old :) *knocking on wood*. I
only hot glued the first generation SATA connectors, because they lose
contact from time to time, before I did this, but those drives don't
cause issues since the connectors are hot glued.
Regards,
Ralf
Quoting Ralf Mardorf
<ralf.mardorf(a)alice-dsl.net>et>:
Don't count on it. Joern recently told me about his experience with
similar "Green" WD drives where the drive died for him after a few month
of continued use. He mentioned something about a special windows driver
that controls the spin up/down cycles for WD drives, but I did not
bother to inquire the details. "All WD external hard drives will spin down
(enter into power saver
mode) after 10 minutes of drive inactivity. Once the drive is accessed
again, the drive will exit from the power saver mode and spin back up.
If it's designed to spin down it's probably also designed to be able to
handle that. 
11 Mar
11 Mar
10:42 a.m.
On 09/03/13 17:44, Robin Gareus wrote:
My experience with WD Green drives has also been bad. I bought them for
home server use as they are quieter and use less power, but both drives
in my RAID array failed within 18 months. I've now replaced them with
conventional 7200rpm drives.
Jonathan
>If
it's designed to spin down it's probably also designed to be able to
>handle that.
Don't count on it. Joern recently told me about his
experience with
similar "Green" WD drives where the drive died for him after a few month
of continued use. He mentioned something about a special windows driver
that controls the spin up/down cycles for WD drives, but I did not
bother to inquire the details.
2:30 p.m.
On Mon, 2013-03-11 at 09:42 +0000, Jonathan Gazeley wrote:
My experience with WD Green drives has also been bad.
I bought them for
home server use as they are quieter and use less power, but both drives
in my RAID array failed within 18 months. I've now replaced them with
conventional 7200rpm drives.
I guess inside my drive is a conventional 3.5" 7200rpm drive, just some
controller does cause the spin down and up, down and up ... or are there
special 3.5" 72000rpm drives available too?
Did you also have a 24 month warranty?
For my brand new I've got 24 month warranty, OTOH in the German WD
forums I read about issues regarding to the warranty, I already sent a
request to my dealer, asked at the German WD forum and wrote to the
English WD support.
At the moment a script touchs the drive every 5 minutes, just to avoid
the noise the spin downs and ups make.
I don't understand why the drive does spin up, when not in use. It's not
perfect, but for my usage ok, if the drive would spin down and keep
parking the heads and turned off the motor, but without being mounted,
without access, it spins up several times an hour, just t spin down
again. Is there a valid reason to do this? I guess it's a bug.
Regards,
Ralf
18 Mar
18 Mar
6:13 p.m.
The issue that the drive will spin up and down again and again can be
avoided.
I removed
- thunar-volman
- tumbler
- gvfs
on Arch Linux. No packages depend on those packages for my Arch Linux.
The drive keeps asleep, even with still one partition mounted.
Later I'll add one package after the other, to find out what does cause
the access and I also will take a look at Ubuntu.
19 Mar
19 Mar
8:44 a.m.
New subject: [solved] External USB 2 HD for real-time recording
On Mon, 2013-03-18 at 18:12 +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
The issue that the drive will spin up and down again
and again can be
avoided.
I removed
- thunar-volman
- tumbler
- gvfs
on Arch Linux. No packages depend on those packages for my Arch Linux.
The drive keeps asleep, even with still one partition mounted.
Later I'll add one package after the other, to find out what does cause
the access and I also will take a look at Ubuntu.
Arch Linux:
Only gvfs needs to be removed, no need to remove thunar-volman and
tumbler. However, thunar-volman without gvfs seems to be useless.
Tumbler doesn't cause issues, but I don't know what it's good for. To
see thumbnails with Thunar it isn't needed.
I keep thunar-volman and tumbler on Arch and only removed gvfs. For my
Arch nothing depends on gvfs, so it was the only package I had to remove.
Ubuntu Quantal:
root@q:~# apt-get purge gvfs
The following packages will be REMOVED:
brasero* gvfs* gvfs-backends* gvfs-fuse* nautilus* nautilus-sendto*
nautilus-share*
Who cares about the packages that depend on it? I anyway use Thunar
instead of Nautilus and K3b instead of Brasero.
Résumé:
So who is to blame?
By EU Regulation external drives must spin down.
I even didn't completely read the German blah blah blah,
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Ab-2010-Maximal-2-Watt-im-Standby-Be…
and I won't search for links in English.
Xfce doesn't depend on gvfs, neither the Arch, nor the Ubuntu packages.
Until now it seems to be, that without gvfs, partitions can't be mounted
with a file browser, they have to be mounted by CLI. It's not only an
issue for the USB drive, but also for USB sticks.
It takes 30 minutes, then the WD Elements spins down and stays asleep.
If you don't like this,than blame the EU.
If you like it, then blame gvfs.
Does VirtualBox still see my iPad 2 connected by USB when gvfs is
removed?
No problem, even an USB stick and even the
external USB hard disk are available by VirtualBox.
Is my KORG nanoKONTROL still accessible after removing gvfs?
It still does show up in QjackCtl's ALSA tab.
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11 comments
5 participants
participants (5)
-
Jonathan Gazeley -
Len Ovens -
Peder Hedlund -
Ralf Mardorf -
Robin Gareus